Digitalisation of Car Heating Port for Electric Vehicle Charging

Basic Information

Students: Tuomas Toivonen, Vili-Veikko Vaara, Semen Koveshnikov

Project manager: Semen Koveshnikov 

Instructor: Anouar Belahcen

Other advisors: Victor Mukherjee

Starting date: 10.1.2023

Completion date: 9.6.2023

Introduction

Number of electric vehicles (EV) has been growing rapidly worldwide and in Finland. EV adoption may grant independence from oil-based fuels and, if running on low-carbon power, can deliver significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. However, in Finland, infrastructure for EV charging is not following the EV fleet growth. Fully fledged charging points are costly and require much labour to install stations due to their complexity. Therefore, new solutions are needed to accelerate the infrastructure building process.

We propose a low-power rating charging via heating port sockets that can be found in abundance in Finland. Control and metering capabilities of smart circuit breakers used in our solution offer the required basis for EV charging.

Description

Ordinary heating boxes can be retrofitted with smart circuit breakers to realize the necessary control and metering capabilities for EV charging. This way, billing and remote charging cycle control are facilitated. The low power rating of the sockets (3kW) can be neglected, as the average private EV daily trip is up to 100 km. The charging power of the sockets is enough to cover the range after a few hours of charging. 

Box Assembly 

The heating box is big enough to incorporate two more circuit breakers that can be controlled via ZigBee wireless protocol.

Connectivity

The smart circuit breakers are connected via ZigBee to a gateway and then to the cloud via a router. The cloud allows to seamlessly and quickly expand the charging points park for a customer or charging point operator. 

Web Application

Current version of web application is a prototype with the required functionality of control and metering. It is realised with Flask for the understanding of needed features and working principles testing (e.g. cloud API).

Contacts

If you are interested to know more about the project, please, contact Semen Koveshnikov (semen.koveshnikov@aalto.fi).